ATTTO Out of Touch

From the comments by ATTTOs CEO Elizabeth Valentine in the Sunday Star Times article “Business savvy vital for cup legacy” it is clear that this key industry training organisation is way out of touch with 21st century customer service development methodologies.

According to Chris Bell Managing Director of Customer Experiences, a company that specialises in the development of high quality customer experiences, its clear the heavily subsidised KiaOraMai customer service training programme that was launched by the Minister of Tourism in 2010 to help tourism organisations improve their service delivery during the Rugby World Cup has been a complete failure.

The goal of the programme was to have 7-10,000 front-line tourism staff complete the course by September 2011. It’s clear based on the current uptake they will not get any where close to that number said Bell.

Thinking that by just having front-line staff attend a customer service training workshop an organisation’s long-term customer service performance will improve, is an ineffective and outdated strategy that clearly many businesses have tried and found there was very little return on the investment, resulting in an unwillingness to try again.

A major goal for the tourism industry at this year’s world cup is to deliver a visitor experience that will motivate international rugby fans to recommend New Zealand as a tourism destination when they return home. The quality of service as part of the overall experience will have a huge impact on the success of that goal.

Bell said that unless organisations like ATTTO and the wider industry get to grips with up to date customer experience development and implementation strategies that take a long-term approach to the experience delivered by front-line staff; not only will we not fully capitalise of this year’s Rugby World Cup opportunity, but we will not get close to delivering on the industry’s 2015 strategic goal of “delivering a world-class visitor experience”

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– Chris Bell is managing director of Customer Experiences; a company that specialises in helping businesses improve the way in which they interact with customers and clients. www.customerexperiences.co.nz chris@customerexperiences.co.nz mb 027 2792360